Authors

Redell Olsen

Biography

Redell Olsen was educated at university in Cambridge and London. Her publications include Book of The Fur (Cambridge: Rem Press, 2000), Secure Portable Space (Hastings: Reality Street, 2004), Here Are My Instructions (London: Gefn Press, 2004) and Punk Faun: a baroque pastel (London: Parataxis Editions, 2006). She is the editor of the internet journal How(2 and course director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Sample Text

ruscha's triumph of galatea

two breathe clouds across the sky to one another being scarred by birds they stand on wavy air push on neighbouring particles to make tunes I permanently bound into the stuff of naked walls slaked lime paste and coarse marble on canapés between points of compression the china bones as see through this longitudinal nicety gasps up tempo as do I I do resounds over shelves rusty in casting shapely hearts or how the head holds a flood marker gauges stubborn wet lime marked in place of face grinds pigment for speaking out of rheuming it through violently spun air blubbers a funnel for listening with what cannot be fanfare stronger for liquid intake concrete quibbles stick but in itself does not vibrate stocks of the same if all surfaces are magnets then we might travel cheaply outside to find ourselves encrusted at the navel with the body of a man or the torso of a horse and buy it up in expectation of the pain in kick that is deployed as a mammal might be in enemy waters where even dolphins have teeth pulling away fast from what look like shells AWOL or just meeting up with the other local marine life to search for patterns at every nth click tears past Standard Gas Stations gestations in series painted in black and orange L'AMOUR or L-I-S-P- spelled out in ribbons rime can be thick enough to resemble shades enchanted for repel of damage designed for everyday life but mostly out of range between various small fires nightly on TV a dog chews a skirt and a scooter carries a bucket of water as a chariot carries a peacock to a jolly good show at the arthouse battery while a midriffed attack bluffs an achingly breathless feat driving a transit van freeway GALATEA rolling out of lanes into a dark blue sky permanently lost in gold plate tossed out after the main course into The Tiber sights for a banked sore eye in mock tapestry gone with the job of painting in the curtains or straddling forced cirrus and falling from tromped oils done neatly ice effect grates for furnishing reflections in the droplets just like a real life wrestle with a lion or an ally or a landscape hidden in a wall your breast is at an angle as if slipped off by some cumulous translation as restoration of a fixed point from which to survey an imaginary view from around the back as some future watcher positioned cornered up walls garlanded outlandish with plants just discovered happily already there

"Secure Portable Space is full of recombinant surprise, filmic ambiguity and more: gripplingly melancholic and witty explorations of the lie/noir courage and absurdity of culture, politics and gender." Joan Retallack